Making America Safe for Foreskins

Circumciser, Heal Thyself

To Playboy (published April 1983):
The most damning and unanswerable indictment against
circumcision and those who circumcise babies is the fact
that the vast majority of uncircumcised males throughout the
world keep their foreskins intact -- and the fact that so
many circumcised men would rather have their foreskins
intact.
Awareness of those two facts would make persons of
good will refuse to destroy this sensitive, harmless part of
a baby's body.
The circumcisers of the world are aware of those two
facts, but they continue to circumcise babies anyway,
knowing that some of them will eventually resent that that
was done to them and knowing that males who are given the
choice overwhelmingly reject that operation.
Can reason and persuasion change the minds of those
who commit such an act?
It's not circumcision that needs to be studied. It's
circumcisers.

[This is the letter that broke Playboy's long silence about
circumcision. It started a debate in the "Playboy Forum" that
continued at least 18 months, when I finally lost track of it.
The last two sentences have been widely quoted. Playboy printed
another letter from me a year later in its
April 1984 issue. These two letters, along with the one below
printed in Penthouse in 1983 (I still don't know which
issue), brought the total copies of my letters about circumcision
in print to well over 10 million -- a record, I think, at the time.]

To Obstetrics and Gynecology (10/4/84):
Most men who circumcise babies, like most men who want
babies circumcised, were themselves circumcised as babies,
and therefore have no way of knowing how a foreskin feels,
what it's like to have one, how the absence of a foreskin
has affected their lives, or how it affects the lives of the
babies they circumcise.
If a man is so blind to his own blindness that he
seeks -- or is even just willing -- to blind those who can
see, shouldn't he be told he's blind?

To Forum (12/16/85):
Regardless how harmless or even beneficial cutting off
a baby's foreskin might seem to whoever cuts it off or wants
it cut off, the result for the baby is the same: going
through life (assuming he lives) with as much as half or
more of the natural surface of his penis missing.
Since the vast majority of males who reach adulthood
with their foreskins intact -- even in societies in which
most males don't -- would feel perfectly justified defending
themselves any way necessary from anyone who tried to cut
their foreskins off, cutting off a male's foreskin before
he's old enough to protect himself amounts to foreskin
amputation by force.
If the only way a male can be made to part with his
foreskin is to cut it off by force, what does that say about
those who commit such an act? What does that say about
societies that tolerate it? What does that say about
institutions that sanctify it?
Anyone who examines a penis with its foreskin intact
and a penis with its foreskin missing can see clearly what
circumcision does to the body. Considering how willing, even
determined, some men become, once their foreskins are
severed, to force that amputation on others -- even their
own sons -- perhaps the first question that should be asked
is: What does circumcision do to the mind?

To the American Academy of Pediatrics (1/14/88):
The section about molesters in your pamphlet, "Child
Sexual Abuse," doesn't mention one of the most common, most
destructive types of all: men who, behind the mask of
medicine or religion, try to make their own lack of a
foreskin seem normal by cutting off the foreskins of
children and babies.

(cc: Every officer and member of the executive boards of the
American Medical Association, the American Academy of
Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists; C. Everett Koop, MD, Surgeon General of the
U.S.)

[An earlier version of this letter was published in a late
1983 issue of Penthouse.]